Elon joked (a couple of times) that Waymo cars cost “way mo’ money” because they require lidar and radar, in addition to cameras, to operate autonomously. Tesla wants to drive autonomously with only cameras, but it has yet to achieve full self-driving capabilities.
The goal is to get there soon with better AI and a whole lotta compute power. And that may work out for Tesla. It also may not.
Either way, Musk said that “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” despite the fact that Waymo is already commercially operating in four cities with plans for several more, and Tesla is commercially operating in zero cities.
Again, Musk is hanging his hat on Tesla’s promise to achieve autonomy with its current sensor suite of cameras and an end-to-end neural network approach that has been trained on billions of examples of real-world data. Then Teslas in the land will be able to turn into robotaxis with nothing but a software update. No mention though about all of the Tesla vehicles that will require a hardware update to achieve that goal.
